Wednesday, November 9, 2011

I’ve been wanting to get back to this space for weeks -- er, months -- now. I think about it often. I imagine that little thing I wanted to share. I even imagine an image that would perfectly show that little thing. But then life -- er, work -- intervenes. Not only have I not been present here, but I’ve not really been present to myself. Whole parts of my life -- the creative, the meticulous -- have fallen away under the pressures of a new job.

Instead of painting -- and then sharing -- the window trim that has been glaring at me for a month now (ever since I ripped down the interior shutters in a hasty move to get more light), I try to figure out how I’m going to teach Whitman on Thursday or paragraphing next week. When I do snatch a free moment to vacuum -- that most satisfying of domestic duties -- I find myself thinking about next semester’s syllabi instead of extra-academic projects. And god knows, I don’t want this blog to be exclusively about syllabi and my students’ comma splices.

I thought about abandoning this space altogether, letting it sit as a memorial to my past self, but I’m not quite there yet. I want to believe that I can find something back here because finding something back here means finding some kind of balance for myself. It means taking the time to see Homer. Taking time to eat up his sleepy loveliness.

It also means taking the time to get to my knitting group on Monday evenings. On weeks when I’m feeling moderately sane, I join a group of five women, most of whom are mothers, some of whom live off the grid, all of whom get me out of my teaching mind.

It also means eating slowly. J and I are often moving frantically in two different directions. Occasionally, though, one of us gets home early, warms the stove, and surprises the other with a dinner fully formed. We light candles and inhale. I keep hoping that this might happen every night, but given everything else, I settle for a couple times a week.

So I want to get back here. I need to get back here. I really am going to get back here.

Inhabitant

I’m an anxious academic who recently fled the big city for the rural South. I now reside in an old house with a charming -- if curmudgeonly -- historian, J, and our latest addition, a roadside puppy named Homer. I’m happiest with a skein of yarn, a lump of clay, a yard of fabric, a cup of flour. I might be less happy--but I'm satisfied in other ways--with a stack of papers or an article needing revisions. This space records and reflects this tension, between vocation and avocation. It's neither entirely domestic nor culinarily concerned. It's often autobiographical, sometimes downright chatty. Though it may not seem like it, I hide more than I disclose, but that's just to keep you guessing.